Priority. Time. Deep Work. Willingness.

Are you looking to become a senior product manager? If yes, then this article is for you.

Why Become a Senior Product Manager?

• Do you make more money? Yes.
• Do you get to use the same skills as before? Yes, more or less.
• Do you get to solve bigger problems? Yes.
• Does the “senior” title give you a boost of confidence? Maybe.

Your motivations might be a bundle of those above, or just one of them, but it’s likely that if you’re a Product Manager now, your next role will be a Senior Product Manager.

Yes, technically, a Product Manager at Airbnb is like a Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, and could also be a Principal Product Manager at another company, or even Head of Product at an early stage company.

That’s Silicon Valley companies. But the majority of Product Managers don’t work in San Francisco.

They work elsewhere, at those other companies. And those companies will likely roll with the more or less standard APM — PM — SPM model, before they diverge again at the people leader levels.

Before I go ahead, I just want to focus on one aspect that interests me as a money-hungry individual: how much does a senior product manager make?

How Much Does a Senior Product Manager Make?

I may have got you hooked, but the trouble is: I don’t know where you’re coming from. So I’ll likely miss with my data.

I live in New Zealand, where Product Managers get much less than in several other countries.

Here are some stats from 4 geographies, with a comparison of Product Manager salaries along side:

Senior Product Managers make about 30% more than Product Managers on average.

Median-shmedian. If you’re good, you should be asking for more.

(And if you’re also in New Zealand, sorry mate.)

What Does a Senior Product Manager Do?

According to Jackie Bavaro, here’s how it goes.

Either role can start as part of a product team.

A Product Manager will design, say, better remote working headphones. They will own the product roadmap. They will spend most of their time with the engineering team. They’ll do customer interviews, test prototypes, and work closely with marketing to successfully launch the new product. But on day-to-day basis their focus will be closer to either improving & optimising a product that was conceived and sponsored by someone else.

A Senior Product Manager will do market research & discover the market opportunity for better remote working headphones while speaking to customers and partners during their day-to-day work. They’ll create a product strategy to win the market, analyze which audience to address first, and convince executives to spin up a new team. Then, they’ll also interview customers, test prototypes, and work closely with marketing to successfully launch the new product.

The difference is in the individual scope. Senior Product Managers have additional scope.

This nuance might be invisible to the rest of the team.

Jackie says it’s really about 3 things about the Senior PM role:

1. Strategy
2. Autonomy
3. Nuance

If a Product Manager will focus on incremental value, a Senior Product Manager will make bolder bets & get them funded.

This requires not only confidence, but the ability to strategise, analyse and convince — all in a day’s work, alongside building the actual product.

What a Senior Product Manager Doesn’t Do?

An SPM is a product leader who is skilled in product development with several years of product management experience.

But we’re not talking about a people leader role here. SPMs are individual contributors.

If the role is expected to manage a team of product managers, it’s more likely a lead product manager/group product manager or even a product director role, requiring a different set of skills altogether.

If so, then on the product side, you’ll be focusing on product strategy across several product lines. You’ll work closer with the leadership team in the realm of business strategy.

Your core PM skills will come handy when coaching the people you manage. After all, it would be good to know what they do and how they do it, or how they can do it better.

So, even if the SPM has more scope than a PM, at least you won’t have to worry about managing people.

So, with all that out of the way, what can you do to become a Senior Product Manager?

Becoming a Senior Product Manager

1. Strategy & Prioritisation
2. Time For Synthesis
3. Making Bets & Pitching

Strategy & Prioritisation

While product manager surveys don’t distinguish the difference between time spent in PM & SPM roles, they do dive into skills.

The key aspect of work that all product people always lament having less of is “strategising”.

You may recall that one of the key differentiators of an SPM was this ability to strategise and bring a product to market.

In addition, one of the core competencies of a product manager is their ability to prioritise. In fact, in the 2021 survey done by ProductPlan, most PMs stated that their peers actually lacked good prioritisation skills.

Strategy and prioritisation are close cousins.

Strategy is sequence. Prioritisation is order.

Strategy is using levers. Some levers have different force depending on in which priority you press them.

When most people think prioritisation, and when most PM’s write about prioritisation, they end up suggesting one of the many product prioritisation frameworks out there. Our team was just discussing if we had one last week. When someone brings up a prioritisation framework, my heart sinks.

If you’d like to learn more about why prioritisation frameworks suck, you should check out this excellent article.

If you still feel like you need one, here’s the best article on prioritisation frameworks (all or most of them).

You really can’t rely on a framework unless it’s a closely codified representation of your strong beliefs, your vision of the reality that you identified. You can use an Impact score in the ICE framework, but what are you trying to impact? If it’s a proxy for customers, are we talking new, existing, churned? Are we talking the same type of customer? Same market?

Details matter.

Time For Synthesis

When I spoke to my senior colleagues in Senior Product roles, they all spoke about the need to synthesise a large variety of data over a period of time to come up with a view of the world and a plan for how to fit into it.

If you latched on to 1 aspect here and it’s “data”, you’re not wrong, but you’re missing a more important and reliable aspect: time.

You need time, not only to grow into the role — which can take at least 3–5 years — but also time on a weekly basis to think deeply, synthesise and test your ideas.

But no one has time, right? We all lament not having the time to strategise?

The reasons why you don’t have the time may vary. They may be legitimate.

But consider an insight from the life of my friend Alex.

Alex wants to lose weight. She laments not having the time to do many things around this concept of “losing weight”. Often, she jumps to conclusions, and in the spur of the moment she even tries to enact mini-revolutions in her life. For a few days, she goes to the gym in the morning (then eats her weight in ice cream). For a week, she tries keto (but doesn’t go for a walk when the sun’s out). She tries and fails many methods, never reaching any level of mastery in them.

Alex is great at other things, in other domains. She is diligent at work, throws well-orchestrated parties for her friends, and can play the guitar well. It’s just that this image of herself of “being fit” is not something she’s ever prioritised.

See what I’m getting at?

It’s quite possible that you don’t have time for strategy because you don’t know what to do, and you don’t want to feel like a fool, and you’d rather do what you’re good at.

So when the opportunity arises to work on strategy, you probably do everything you can not to do it. You don’t orchestrate moments in your life to work on it.

So you end up in the same place yet again, grasping for another prioritization framework that you think might help.

But suppose you’ve chanced upon a good set of loops that describe how you want & don’t want to play. Is that it?

Making Bets & Pitching

You still have to sell your ideas to the world.

Only your mother may love you unconditionally. For others, you’re going to have to work harder to convince and get support.

This can be the easiest or the hardest part of the whole equation.

But even if you like pitching to people, doesn’t mean you’re good at it.

When was the last time you presented a new idea to someone else outside of your team?

When was the last time you felt deep conviction about a particular choice?

How does your organisation even do this? Do they write 6-pagers like Amazon, or do they make slides and present them in secret meetings, to go over other people’s head?

It still goes back to time and effort.

You’re not going to nail it the first time you do it.

• Just like in product, you’ll forget that distribution > product (you’ll get the format, time & place wrong).
• You’ll forget to listen to your customers (they’ll be confused & caught off-guard).
• You’ll spend too much time building (rearranging text boxes in each slide before you have the outline of the whole pitch).

So practice in your spare time. Pitch products that you wish existed. Research problems that affect you in your life and propose ways to solve them. Pitch to your partner or parents.

When it comes to pitches, I could direct you to a few resources, but this one is the most standout for me:

It’s Like Riding a Bike

Marty Cagan probably sent a whole cohort of aspiring product people to the therapist by once saying that Product Managers really can’t get the work they need done in less than 60 hours a week.

So you might be thinking: does a Senior Product Manager also work harder? (30% more?)

Most of the data around “time spent on activities” out there mixes APM, PM & SPM roles together, so it’s hard to know the difference in time spent. But you can probably make a safe bet that with more scope, you might have to spend more time working.

Not necessarily.

CEO’s don’t make mini worm-holes to make space for their their enormous scope of responsibility. They delegate & have supporting structures to help them deal with the work.

You won’t have people to delegate to, at least not directly. You can still build deliberate productivity systems. Manage your time well. Build up scalable processes for discovery & market research.

You could become a Senior PM in less than 3 years.

It’s certainly possible to have fun earlier in your career. But let’s be real, no one loved falling off a bike when they were learning. You loved it when you could ride in a straight line without falling off.

I remember when my younger brother learned to ride his bike in less than a few days one summer. Maybe it was the other kids who could ride bikes when he couldn’t, or maybe it was my taunts, but he just tried and tried until he got it.

Then he rode with us all the way to the lake a good few kilometres away, and he never fell once.

Take your time, take it easy, and don’t forget to have fun.